I received a concerned email from one of our clients this week asking what had happened to the reviews on his Google Places page.  The firm's Places page was showing a total of 34 reviews at the beginning of last month and when he happened to check over the weekend his review count had dropped to just 5.  

He was worried that his reviews had been removed because of a violation or error he was not aware of.  He reached out to see what we thought had happened and what steps we could take to rectify the problem.

Uncovering The Real Culprit

I began to do some research and realized that our client was far from the only one experiencing this.  In fact, the change in review counts was an intentional move by Google.  

Google recently revamped the look and layout of their Places pages.  Most of the changes were aesthetic in nature including a cleaner overall look and more prominent "call to action" buttons.  However, one significant change was that Google is no longer showing reviews from 3rd party review sites such as Yelp and Citysearch nor is it counting them in the total number of reviews it shows for each place.  Instead, Google is showing the 3rd party review counts at the bottom of the page with a link to the reviews.

As a result, many businesses saw their total review counts go down.  One example from this Techcrunch article points out:

For instance, the Google Places page for Paxti's Chicago Pizza in San Francisco went from 1,110 reviews to 171 reviews after the non-Google reviews were stripped out.

Why The Change?

So now that we know the change wasn't due to a violation of guidelines or penalty of some sort you may be curious as to why Google made this switch.

One theory is that Google now has enough reviews of its own so that it no longer needs to use 3rd party reviews.  However, another theory is that Google is making adjustments after the launch of the FTC antitrust investigation.  According to the article:

The people familiar with the matter said issues in the FTC probe are expected to include whether Google searches unfairly steer users to the company's own growing network of services at the expense of rival providers.

Techcrunch explains the investigation's connection to Google's Places pages in more detail:

The issue appears to be that Google is using its market power in search to push consumers to its own services. Perhaps the most egregious example of this has been with Google Places, which comes up at the top of search results for pretty much every local search, whether or not it is the best result. The FTC, no doubt, will be asking Yelp about this, which is constantly having run-ins with Google Places. Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Microsoft have also complained about lost clicks.

It seems that Google is looking to ease concerns that it is using 3rd party reviews to bolster their own local places properties.